So far we've looked at which notes to play. Rhythm is about when to play them, and for how long. It's what makes you tap your foot.
Under almost all music there's a steady pulse, the beat. It's what you clap or tap along to. A metronome clicks the beat for you. Start it and tap along:
How fast the beat goes is the tempo, counted in beats per minute (BPM). 60 BPM is one beat per second; 120 BPM is two. Sheet music, especially classical, often uses Italian words for the tempo:
Beats come in groups, with the first beat of each group a little stronger. Each group is a bar (or measure), and bar lines on the separate them. The time signature at the start tells you how many beats are in a bar: the top number counts the beats, the bottom 4 says which note counts as one beat, here a quarter note (see Note values below).
Most pop, rock and blues: four steady beats.
A waltz: ONE two three, ONE two three.
A march: left, right, left, right.
Switch the metronome between them and listen for the accented first beat:
The shape of a note tells you how long it lasts, counted in beats: its note value. In 4/4 (and the other β¦/4 time signatures here) a whole note lasts four beats. Each next value is exactly half as long: a half note is two beats, a quarter note one beat, an eighth note half a beat and a sixteenth note a quarter of a beat. So a bar of 4/4 holds one whole note, two halves, four quarters, eight eighths or sixteen sixteenths.
Notice how they look: a whole note is an open oval; a half note adds a stem; a quarter note fills the oval in; an eighth note adds a flag, a sixteenth two flags. Musicians count the halves of a beat as "1 & 2 &" and the quarters as "1 e & a".
Silence counts too. Every note value has a rest of the same length, telling you not to play for that long:
A dot after a note makes it half as long again. A dotted half note is 2 + 1 = 3 beats, a whole bar of 3/4. A dotted quarter is 1 + Β½ = 1Β½ beats, and is often followed by an eighth note to fill the beat.
Fill a bar of 4/4 with notes and rests. The bar is full when the lengths add up to four beats.
A famous example is the 12-bar blues: twelve bars of 4/4. Each box below is a chord (several notes played together; you'll learn them in the Chords chapter) and lasts one bar. Listen to it strummed on a guitar, one strum on every beat, with the metronome counting along:
Every row of the blues is four bars long, and each chord starts on beat 1 of a bar. Most songs are built from groups of four bars like this.
Next: Intro to Scales